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Daniel Kelly and Verne Gallery
 first telephoned my Cleveland gallery on a cold, snowy day in January 1986, as a winter storm howled outside the window. Daniel Kelly asked if I knew who he was, and I told him I was familiar with his work from several art catalogs. He agreed to rearrange his return trip to Japan to include a four-hour stopover in Cleveland.
The snow was falling heavily and the visibility was low by the time I reached the airport. Rather than battle the elements, Daniel Kelly and I found an empty gate and began lining up his prints along the large windows. We didn't realize that another flight had been scheduled for that particular gate until we turned around to find a crowd of nearly...
The Verne Collection of Japanese prints and paintings was established in 1953 when my parents lived in Japan for two years. In the beginning we specialized in ukiyo-e (floating world prints). The collection included artists such as , , , , Yoshitoshi and other important Japanese printmakers from the 18th and 19th century. With the help of contemporary Japanese print experts like Oliver Statler, Frances Blakemore, Yuji Abe and Norman Tolman, the collection grew to include sosaku hanga and contemporary Japanese prints. Artists such as Koshiro Onchi, Shiko Munakata, Kiyoshi Saito, Umetaro Azechi, Ryohei Tanaka, Katsunori Hamanishi, Toko Shinoda and many others were added from the 1960’s to the present. The shin hanga artists like Hasui, Shinsui, Kotondo, Goyo, and Hiroshi Yoshida would become an important part of the Verne Gallery in the 1980’s.
Almost one hundred years after the western artists such as Bertha Lum, Helen Hyde, and Charles Bartlett, the Verne Collection would become one of the most important galleries in the world for present day western artists in Japan. Clifton Karhu, , Brian Williams,Sarah Brayer, Joel Stewart, Micah Schwaberow, Margaret K.Johnson, and Joshua Rome would emerge as some of the leading printmakers and painters in Japan and throughout the world.
The Verne Collection exhibits in the top shows in , , , and Washington D.C.. a few minutes from the Cleveland Museum of Art.
In these times when life seems to have speeded up on many levels, I invite you to take in the quiet elegance of the work of the artists in the . I hope you enjoy our new web page.
Sincerely,
Michael Verne
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